The development of electronic technology, network technology and the like has brought families more and more electronic consuming products. Among these household appliances, audio/video related electric appliances alone are too numerous to be listed, such as color TV, audio device, digital camera, digital virtual disc (DVD), set-top box and so on. In addition, the digital media adapter (DMA) has realized the connection and communication between conventional household electronic appliances and computers. It is foreseeable that appliance networks consist of various electric appliances in digitized families in the future will be more complicated and the same is true for the office environment and industrial environment.
However, while meeting the demands, diversification of the products has brought such technical problem as how to control various electric appliances in the same environment. The conventional mode for multi-appliance control is providing a remote controller for each appliance. When controlling an appliance, first select a remote controller corresponding to the appliance, and realize the desired control functions by using control buttons on the control panel of the remote controller. Disadvantage of such a control mode is obvious. With a “multi-appliance remote controller” designed through improvement, functions of a plurality of remote controllers are combined, that is, some universal function keys are reused and appliance switching keys are used to realize the switch among the controlled appliances.
As shown in FIG. 1, the main difference between a multi-appliance remote controller and a conventional remote controller controlling a single appliance is that the multi-appliance remote controller has appliance switching keys, such as keys denoted by “appliance 1”, “appliance 2”, “appliance 3” and “appliance 4” in FIG. 1. These appliance keys are used to realize the switch between the controlled appliances. Suppose appliance 1 is a TV, appliance 2 is a DVD player, appliance 3 is a set-top box (STB) and appliance 4 is a standby appliance or another appliance.
Suppose an output signal of the STB is received by an AV1 input of the TV and an output signal of the DVD player is received by an AV2 input of the TV, when a user is watching digital TV and controlling the relevant operations using STB, the current appliance controlled by the multi-appliance remote controller is appliance 3 (STB). In this case, if the user wants to play a DVD disk, the operations needed to fulfill the switch from the current appliance STB to the target appliance DVD is as follows. The user first presses the appliance switching key “appliance 1” on the control panel of the multi-appliance remote controller to switch the current control appliance STB to an intermediate appliance, i.e. the TV, presses the key AV2 on the control panel of the remote controller to switch the AV1 mode to the AV2 mode, presses the appliance switching key “appliance 2” on the control panel of the multi-appliance remote controller to switch the current control appliance TV to the target appliance DVD player, and uses suitable function keys on the multi-appliance remote controller to implement functions such as DVD turning on, disk loading, disk reading, etc.
According to the foregoing control process, multiple operations of appliance switching keys are needed to control the switch between appliances by using the multi-appliance remote controller, and corresponding function controls are needed for related appliances, such as the current appliance, the intermediate appliance and the target appliance, thus such switch process is prone to errors and incorrect operations.